A new survey just released has reported that nearly a third of all Irish businesses have experienced some form of cybercrime in the last year.

The report which was conducted by Deloitte in conjunction with EMC found that the most common form of attack was by hacking. This was followed by the misuse of IT privilege and attacks via malware.

One interesting finding was that many companies said their own staff caused the biggest problems through activities that breached IT security protocol.

Nearly 43 per cent of companies who responded to the survey said that these attacks had caused a loss of productivity.

However, on the flip side, only 45 per cent of companies believed that cybercrime was a priority in terms of business loss although most did admit that they regularly assessed security risks within their organizations.

A further 57 per cent of companies said that they had an IT security programme that functioned adequately.

A spokesperson for Deloitte said that they believed it was critical for more organizations to give cybercrime a much higher priority status as a serious breach in security could have disastrous results.